What's on your mind?

I've been out in the community talking to service groups and hooking up with people at coffee gatherings, and I'm getting an earful from folks around here on how they view the News-Review.

For the most part, the folks out there are positive about our publication.

We invariably get the line about being too liberal or too conservative. In almost every case it is an Associated Press story and not one that we produced locally.

Here's the bottom line from where I sit in the editor's chair, and it's not original and it's not profound, but it does explain where people come from.

We all view stories through our own set of eyes, the prism of our experiences, prejudices and perceptions. Two people can look at the same story and come away with entirely different takes on that story.

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I've taken heat for the press' treatment of Sarah Palin, but she is who she is - while decrying Barack Obama's "socialism," she oversees a state with no income or sales tax, where the state bludgeons the oil and gas industry into paying such high royalties that every man, woman and child gets more than 3,000 bucks, each year.

When that was pointed out some cried foul, but hey, over and above that Alaska receives two bucks back for every one it sends to Washington. If you want to talk about the "socialist" redistribution of wealth, it doesn't get much more distributed than that.

Of the concerns in the community, the economy is decidedly number one.

For many the issue is their own or family business, and how Michigan's economy and the U.S. economy are impacting how they do their business.

There's the general concern for the economy as a whole. They wait with bated breath as to how the economy will move - forward or back some more.

And finally, as millions and millions have joined the 401k brigade or put money aside in other investment instruments, there's the tangible loss of retirement funds.

It's a black day when some in a group of Charlevoix Rotarians last week felt good that their portfolios had only dropped 35 to 40 percent this year, rather than the 50 percent some were experiencing.

The bright sign in all that is they were all sticking with the market, looking forward to their contributions buying into funds at bargain basement prices, which bodes well for the economy if more and more people believe in the market and keep their contributions coming.

So what's on your mind? What concerns do you have with life in 2008, and how might we provide you with the information and services to help you navigate these rocky times?